Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/45

 24 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. prosperity rose cities such as Posidonia, Cumae, Cortona, Meta- pontus, Sybaris, and Tarentum, even Adria and distant Massalia. The architectonic and sculptured monuments found on the sites of not a few of these colonies, as well as those that come out, from time to time, of their ruined temples and tombs, are quite as beautiful as those that sprang into being on the soil of the mother- country. Finally, between these several Hellas, forming four distinct groups on terra-firma, each with a distinct existence of its own, and a no less separate destiny, is a whole Hellas, insular Hellas, floating as it were on the ** broad back of the ocean." This is Sicily, stretching between Italy and Africa, Sicily on whose soil the struggle which was waged between the Hellenic and Phoenician element — whilst influencing each other — was carried on for more than three hundred years. To this Hellas belong the islands of the Hadriatic, looking both towards their mother-country and the Italian peninsula ; then, south and east of these, on the path to Egypt and Asia Minor, Cythaera and Creta, the Cyclad96 and Sporades, Rhodes and Cyprus, Samos, Lesbos, and Chios, the islands off the Thracian coast, and many more, both small and great, all those lands fantastically scattered on the waters, which a graphic and picturesque pen has likened unto stepping-stones that children had dropped in shallow water to enable them to reach dry-shod the opposite bank. Men and merchandise, unwrought and manufactured goods, divine simul- acra, together with the notions and sentiments they embody, industrial processes and plastic types found there, at all those halting- and resting-places, stupendous facilities for circulation and transport. The archipelago, or rather these hospitable archipel- agoes, were the happy meeting-places where contacts productive of inestimable good had their being ; where the Greek first met folk of another speech and land, then folk of his own stock and language, but of other tribes. The race that worked for itself so enviable a situation on the borders of Europe, Africa, and Asia, is one of the most richly endowed, perhaps the most highly endowed, that has as yet appeared on the globe s surface. Other great nations, the Egyptians and Chaldaeans, after a brilliant season, remained stationary ; from a certain date in their history, they confined themselves to repeating the forms which they had invented in the first period of their activity. As to the Phoenicians, they